Objectivity, Values, And The Christian Librarian

The central questions of Christian librarianship in the postmodern world involve the philosophical grounds of collection development. Are there reliable objective grounds for attempting to build balanced collections? What values ought to guide the librarian in this task? How will the application of those values differ in the context of an evangelical Christian institution

The redescription of the world

‘The redescription of the world’ was a public lecture (the Volmer Fries Distinguished Lecture) for the symposium Sensibilities: Artists and Living Systems, Animals and Plants, in the EMPAC Theater, Troy, New York, in April 2014. The abstract for my lecture read as follows: ‘A persistent problem in the relation of art and theory is the tendency for artworks to be appropriated as mere illustrations of theoretical perspectives. If anything, the problem is exacerbated in the case of art that engages with questions of animal life, where both the art and the animals are frequently drained and flattened in the process of their theoretical appropriation. How might this be resisted? How might the work of language and the work of material animal form find productive common ground without one diminishing the other? The relatively modest notions of description and redescription will be explored in order to build on Niklas Luhmann’s resonant observation that “the function of art is to make the world appear within the world.”’ The lecture included discussion of work from my Scapeland series, which I gave as one of my examples of how artworks might be understood as flawed, provisional redescriptions of the world, by means of their offering what Luhmann calls ‘improbable evidence’, and subject to what Adam Phillips sees as ‘unknowably further’ redescription. One particularly productive and unexpected outcome of the lecture was a meeting the following day with two members of the audience who wanted to find a way to show further work from the Scapeland series in the USA. This led directly to my participation in the exhibition What Does Art Add?: Figuring the More-than-Human World, City Without Walls (cWOW), Newark, New Jersey ,10 April – 29 May, 20155, curated by Janell O’Rourke and Kathryn Eddy.N/

How do we speak about art about animals?

‘How do we speak about art about animals?’, my closing plenary address at the Warsaw conference Animals and their People: The Fall of the Anthropocentric Paradigm?, was the first international paper in which I included discussion of work in my Scapeland series. In part, the abstract read as follows: ‘“De l’animal peut-on parler?,” Jacques Derrida famously asked in relation to philosophy’s tendency to overlook nonhuman animals, and to have little idea of how to speak about their relation to humans in meaningful terms. … Drawing on a range of contemporary examples, including a few of the pieces on show in the Ecce Animalia exhibition in Orońsko, this talk will consider the distinctive “voice” of the artist … The focus will be on artists who engage directly with questions of animal life,. … Conventional distinctions (human versus animal; ethics versus aesthetics) have no useful place here. Instead, to borrow Foucault’s words from a slightly different context, what these artists can sometimes offer are images, experiences and structures “within which we both recognize and lose ourselves’.” Immediately after this talk tje conference delegates were taken on an evening visit to the Ecce Animalia exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, which had been planned to coincide with the conference and which included an installation of early pieces from my Scapeland series. A welcome outcome after the conference was a request from the organizers to translate an essay of mine for the first Polish edited collection of writings on animal stidies. This appeared in 2015 as: ‘Sztuka wspolczesna i prawa zwierzat’, in Zwierzeta i ich ludzie. Zmierzch antropocentrycznego paradygmatu, eds A. Barcz and D. Lagodzka (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Badań Literackich PAN), 2015, pp. 65-87. ISBN 978-83-64703-27-0. (A Polish translation of my essay ‘Contemporary art and animal rights’.)N/

The disorderly animal in contemporary art

‘The disorderly animal in contemporary art’ was a public lecture delivered in March 2017 at Eastern Kentucky University as part of the University’s annual Chautauqua Lecture series. The overall theme of the 2016-17 series was ‘Order and chaos’. The lecture doubled as a keynote address for the 3rd Biennial Living with Animals conference on the theme ‘Co-Existence’, being held at the University at the same time. An immediate practical concern was how to pitch the lecture to two very different audiences sharing the same large lecture theatre, not to mention their rather different expectations of the thematic focus of the talk. An additional difference was that unlike the conference delegates, the local annual Chautauqua Lecture audience was unlikely to know much about either my writing or my art practice. The material I was discussing was the work and the attitudes of a number of contemporary artists, myself included, who engage with ideas about the more-than-human world. I decided to structure the talk around three broad questions. First, why did contemporary art about animals take the shape that it did in the late 20th century? Second, how do contemporary artists think about their work, and how do their artworks work? Finally, what has changed in recent years, and why? This gave me an opportunity to revisit some of the more abrasive artworks discussed in my 2000 book The Postmodern Animal, and to contrast them with some of the quieter but generally more effective works discussed in my 2013 book Artist|Animal, which drew on my detailed interviews with artists. The last of my three questions allowed me to draw attention to the exhibition Co-Existence, curated by Julia Schlosser and Alexandra Murphy, which included some of my work and which was held at the University as part of the Living with Animals conference.N/

Political Petrarchism: The Rhetorical Fashioning of Community in Early Modern Italy

Engaging with a variety of literary and historical sources, in both prose and verse, including letters, chronicles, treaties and the neo-Latin epic, this dissertation examines the centrality of the classically-informed, philosophical idea of friendship (amicitia) in the community-building discourse of Francesco Petrarca's Italy. The first chapter examines Petrarch's treatment of Scipio Africanus as humanistic leader and idealized friend in the Africa. The second chapter proposes a reading of Cola di Rienzo as the first "political Petrarchist" and contextualizes his epistolary campaign to unify mid-fourteenth century Italy. The third chapter explores Petrarch's politics of familiaritas in the letters he addressed to leaders of prominent Italian city-states attempting to reconcile old friends. This study presents an analysis of the rhetorical strategies underlying Petrarch's career as public intellectual, diplomat and poet

Deep optical imaging of the field of PC1643+4631A&B, I: Spatial distributions and the counts of faint galaxies

We present deep optical images of the PC1643+4631 field obtained at the WHT. This field contains two quasars at redshifts z=3.79 & 3.83 and a cosmic microwave background (CMB) decrement detected with the Ryle Telescope. The images are in U,G,V,R and I filters, and are complete to 25th magnitude in R and G and to 25.5 in U. The isophotal galaxy counts are consistent with the results of Metcalde et al. (1996), Hogg et al. (1997), and others. We find an excess of robust high-redshift Ly-break galaxy candidates with 25.0<R<25.5 compared with the mean number found in the fields studied by Steidel et al. -we expect 7 but find 16 - but we do not find that the galaxies are concentrated in the direction of the CMB decrement. However, we are still not sure of the distance to the system causing the CMB decrement. We have also used our images to compare the commonly used object-finding algorithms of FOCAS and SExtractor: we find FOCAS the more efficient at detecting faint objects and the better at dealing with composite objects, whereas SExtractor's morphological classification is more reliable, especially for faint objects near the resolution limit. More generally, we have also compared the flux lost using isophotal apertures on a real image with that on a noise-only image: recovery of artificial galaxies from the noise-only image significantly overestimates the flux lost from the galaxies, and we find that the corrections made using this technique suffer a systematic error of some 0.4 magnitudes.Comment: 17 pages, 40 figures, submitted to MNRAS, 1 large figure avaliable at ftp://ftp.mrao.cam.ac.uk:/pub/PC1643/paper1.figure18.p

X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy to Examine Molecular Composition

The extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectrum is becoming increasingly important. Its most promising applications include lithography for integrated circuits, space-based astronomy, and medical microscopes. Unfortunately, the optical constants of materials, particularly heavy metals, in this range are not well known. This work examines the molecular composition and oxidation rate and depth of thorium. Most of our data is collected through the use of X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS). XPS utilizes the photoelectric effect to obtain data about the exact composition of our material. X-rays are directed at the surface in question, colliding with and dispelling electrons from different energy levels of atoms. By measuring the number of electrons dispelled and their energies, the presence and quantities of elements can be determined. Depth profiling is done to examine the deeper layers of the sample, in which layers are etched off and new data is obtained. The results are then compared with existing literature. These methods are used to determine what chemical bonding occurs on the surface, whether or not it is diffused into lower layers, over what amount of time, and how the chemical composition varies with depth